End family separation at border
If a family enters the United States from Mexico without permission, immigration officials should not separate minor children from their parents. To do so — to detain adults in one facility and send kids to a shelter, maybe in a different state — is cruel and unnecessary. Yet it’s happening.
Enough alarm bells have gone off in Washington that the House appears willing to take up legislation in the coming days to end this monstrous abuse of authority. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Thursday: “We don’t want kids to be separated from their parents.”
Will that edict be enough to drive a solution? One might think so, except that immigration bills and Congress have Separating migrant proved a frustratingly inert children from their combination for years. If lawmakers parents is an abuse of had summoned the authority. courage last year or 10 years ago to fix the broken immigration Congress needs to system, these messes would be pass legislation that avoided. Remember that the would end the policy and so-called Dreamers — the young settle the fate of the foreigners who grew up in the Dreamers. U.S. after being brought here without permission — are still living in limbo.
The current issue with separating children stems from Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ insistence on a zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting people for violating immigration laws. Locking up parents raises the question of what to do with the children. In nearly 2,000 instances, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has separated them. The reasoning is linked to a 1997 court case that requires children to be sheltered in the least restrictive immigration facility possible. In other words, kids can’t be detained with their parents.
But we just get lost in that logic. More likely, the threat of grabbing children is a scare tactic by the Trump administration to dissuade parents from crossing the border or seeking asylum. Until Sessions changed the rules, immigration authorities typically kept families together by releasing them with orders to appear in court.
Court case or not, separating children from parents is heartless. Ryan and a group of House Republicans are working on a bill that would resolve both the treatment of migrant children and the Dreamers. So far, Democrats are staying away.
Ryan’s bill would provide $25 billion for border security, including money to build the wall that President Donald Trump obsesses about. It would end child separations and give the Dreamers a path to stay in the country legally. It would tighten legal immigration by ending the diversity lottery and family member programs. Hardliners have their own version.
Getting a bill through the House and onto the Senate and the president’s desk should be doable. There’s a governing principle at stake that says all people, especially children, should be treated with fairness and compassion.
Both the Dreamers and the separated children were brought to the U.S. by adults. The children should not be unduly punished for the decisions of their parents.
An overwhelming percentage of Americans want to give lawabiding Dreamers a chance to stay in the U.S. We’re certain most Americans also are appalled by the government dividing families.
Congress has failed on immigration reform so many times. It would be a great relief — as well as just and humane — if lawmakers seized on this moment to pass this legislation. It will be tragic if Congress fails again.